Digital supply chain provider Blue Yonder is truly a global operation. It counts almost 8,000 employees in more than 35 offices worldwide, and its customers include retailers, manufacturers, and logistics service providers who all rely on Blue Yonder to optimize their entire supply chains from start to finish.
We recently sat down with members of the Blue Yonder marketing team: Jessica Bargenquast, Project Manager, PT Umphress, Global Director of Digital Marketing Operations, and Wayland Fox, Senior Marketing Director. The Blue Yonder marketing team was the first in the organization to use Wrike, but their experience was so successful that the legal, renewals, and revenue operations teams have all now joined them in using the platform to increase visibility in their workflows.
You can read the full case study here and learn how the Blue Yonder marketing team switched their work management from a text and Excel-based tool to a visually driven, adaptable platform perfect for a team dealing with large-scale asset creation.
Q: What were some of the first steps you took to set up Wrike?
We started to go through and properly define different types of projects, different types of campaigns, and start to build those out. That meant we were having a much more mature conversation about standardization and repeatability of particular campaign types or project motions, led entirely by the project management team.
Having those really meaningful conversations with folks helped us realize that one person does it different than another person, and we need to get them to talk and figure it out. You can always go in and tweak and add things later, but we’re talking about over 90% of these tasks that are the same every single time, so we have a good starting point.
Q: How did you reinforce best practices across your marketing department?
It was important for us that instead of teaching people, “Here’s how you go build your own dashboards,” we started with some spoonfeeding to develop best practices across the department. Because if my dashboard is wildly different than yours, I’m basically asking different questions about my team than you are. It’s going to lead to different priorities or different leadership styles.
We wanted to build things out in a way so that our dashboard is structurally identical to another team leader’s dashboard, so we started developing common thought processes and language around how we look at Wrike.
Q: How do you share information with external stakeholders?
We created external equivalents for a lot of our internal Wrike user-only forms and put those out on our SharePoint so the rest of the organization could start asking for things from marketing.
Now, we’re really focused on collecting the information that our marketing leaders want to see by creating custom fields, and then using the analytics for reporting to give them exactly what they’re looking for.
We’re also using it for finding skill sets like, what does this user really do? For example, with our designers, Wrike can tell us who do we go to if we need an email header for a market landing page.
Q: Can you explain how you use Wrike dashboards to improve workflow visibility?
We’re using our dashboards to track overdue tasks, so you can really tell how overloaded different people are on the team. We have more constructive conversations about taking some of the overdue work and shifting it to another person who doesn’t seem as busy on the team.
So, you’re not just asking people during a standard meeting, “Hey, how do you feel this week? How do you feel about your workload?” No, the data is there, so even somebody who’s sort of just suffering in silence and says they’re fine, the data says they’re really not. Not only are you going to get burnt out, but the people you’re doing this work for are going to get frustrated if you actually can’t deliver on time. Now that we’ve created visibility in the data, we can go ahead and hand this off to somebody else.
Q: Any other ways Wrike helps you boost visibility on your marketing team?
We needed a way to visualize who is out of office on certain days, so we use the workflow chart for that, even though we didn’t have effort recorded for anything. It was actually the easiest way to lay out a list of everybody by overall or by team, and just have a calendar to block out when somebody wasn’t working on a given day.
Ready to learn more about how Blue Yonder’s marketing team put Wrike into action for ultimate success? Read the full case study.
